Supposing Bleak House

Notes

1. VOICE 1. Other Bleak House essays by scholars associated in one way or another with the Dickens Project include those by Budd, Daleski, Eigner, Fletcher, Gilbert , Hack, Hochman, D. A. Miller, Hillis Miller, Sadrin, and Vanden Bossche. The Bleak House bibliography is immense. Among the many studies focusing on Esther Summerson, I have found especially useful those by Cummings, Graver, Peltason, Sternlieb, Welsh, and Wilt. 2. Dever draws especially on Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” and Winnicott’s “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.” To these I would add André Green’s essay “The Dead Mother.” See chapter 3 below. 3. Dever, Death and the Mother, 84; emphasis in the original. 4. Dickens, Bleak House, 580. All further references to the text are to the 2003 Penguin Classics edition and are cited parenthetically by page number. 5. Dever, Death and the Mother, 84. 6. Welsh attempts to distinguish between the two positions by calling the narrator “Summerson” and the protagonist “Esther,” but acknowledges that “this distinction is bound to blur” (Dickens Redressed, 19). In my analysis I have attempted to maintain the distinction by using present-tense verbs (“Esther writes,” “Esther reports”) for the retrospective narrator and past-tense verbs for actions performed by her younger self, but even this strategy is bound to fail. 7. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 97. 8. Newsom (Dickens on the Romantic Side) was the first to emphasize the importance of the uncanny in Bleak House; his discussion remains an invaluable starting point for any subsequent analysis. See also Herbert, “Occult in Bleak House.” NOTES 162 N O T E S T O PAG E S 5 – 1 7 9. We should not overlook the tripling in Esther’s characteristic selfadmonition . For a penetrating discussion of the tension between knowing and not knowing in Dickens, see Bodenheimer, Knowing Dickens, especially chapter 3. Bodenheimer does not discuss Esther, although much of her analysis has direct relevance to my argument here and elsewhere. 10. The phrase appears in Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens, 1:15. Dickens uses different variants of it in his own writing. For the history of this phrase, which had been used previously by other writers, see Sicher, Rereading the City, 50–51. 11. I take the term “unclaimed experience” from Caruth. See chapter 3 below. 12. Hillis Miller makes an early and influential argument along these lines in his 1958 book on Dickens, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels. Similar readings of Esther, although with a different emphasis, tend to dominate in most “political” or ideological readings of the novel. 13. On Esther’s “confusion,” see especially Wilt, “Confusion and Consciousness .” 14. For a different reading of “Summerson,” see Sadrin, “Charlotte Dickens.” 15. My discussion of voice relies heavily on the work of Gérard Genette. For Genette, voice refers to those determinations “dealing with the way in which the narrating itself is implicated in the narrative, narrating in the sense in which I have defined it, that is, the narrative situation or its instance, and along with its two protagonists: the narrator and his audience, real or implied” (Narrative Discourse, 31). Also useful for their emphasis on voice as a sign of the physical body are Barthes, “Grain of the Voice”; Leonardi and Pope, Diva’s Mouth; and Connor, Dumbstruck. See also Brau, La voix narrative. For a reading of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath along lines similar to my discussion of Esther Woodcourt, see Leicester, Disenchanted Self, especially 89–91. 16. For a very different reading of this passage, one that explicitly rejects the idea of trauma, see Case, “Gender and History.” 17. Dever, Death and the Mother, 93. 18. The lodge where Esther and her mother meet is first mentioned in chapter 2: “My Lady Dedlock (who is childless), looking out in the early twilight from her boudoir at a keeper’s lodge, and seeing . . . a child, chased by a woman, running out into the rain to meet the shining figure of a wrapped-up man coming through the gate, has been quite put out of temper” (21). In addition to sounding the mother-daughter theme that will unfold gradually in the following chapters, this passage hints obliquely at the possibility of a father as well. The wet and wrapped-up, “shining” (here read “ghostly”) male figure “coming through the gate” anticipates Hawdon/Nemo, buried behind the iron gate of a London graveyard. There is a further sad irony in the phrase “keeper’s lodge...